Chapter Ninety-Seven: Hopes and Dreams

That start of the vacation was a bit different than how Daphne had planned it. It turned out that Dumbledore planned to retrieve Harry from his relatives only two weeks into the vacation, after which he'd drop him off at the Burrow.

Since Dumbledore apparently also wanted to talk to the Dursleys himself, Moody had told Daphne — and Ginny — that it would be best not to expose the Dursleys to any more contact with the magical world than strictly necessary, so as not to make them too hostile when Dumbledore arrived.

Consequently, Daphne was at home, but she wasn't alone. Ginny had managed to convince Mrs. Weasley to let her stay over for the first two weeks.

Daphne was idly petting Nyx while she read through her spell books looking for new Charms to practice, seated outside in the garden while Mum was training Ginny. The Chaser training was a bit different from the Seeker practice, and both Mum and Ginny were going all out on it, but Daphne had stopped paying attention to it roughly ten minutes in. Quidditch simply didn't interest her enough to keep watching, even when it was her girlfriend being trained.

After what seemed like quite some time, Mum and Ginny landed on the grass.

"So…how did I do?" Ginny asked a bit nervously.

"You've never had any real practice outside of school flying lessons and on your brothers' broomsticks whenever you could get your hands on them?" Mum asked.

Ginny shook her head.

"Well, then you're certainly talented. For Hogwarts standards, you're good, even. On a level beyond that, though, there's a lot of work to be done. Nothing that can't be fixed, though, so don't worry too much about it," Mum said.

Ginny frowned. "Where did I make the most mistakes?" she asked.

"Currently, I'd say you're too easy to throw off your game. Once I can get you to deviate from your initial plan, it's not hard to keep you off it, and because I know what you're trying to get back to, I can make moves to prevent it. You don't trust your own flying enough, either, which exacerbates the issues," Mum said. "Don't worry about it too much, though. You're doing really well."

Ginny didn't seem entirely convinced, but she nodded anyway and went to take a shower.

"Is it just me, or are you tougher on Ginny than on Harry?" Daphne asked.

Mum shook her head. "I'm not. I'm equally hard on both of them, or on anyone else I train. I just don't think you fully realize how good Harry is at this. Ginny is talented, she really is. Harry, however, is obscenely talented. If it weren't for Krum, I'd confidently say he's the best player of his generation, and I'm genuinely not sure which one of them is better when it comes to raw talent."

"He's better than us at dueling, too," Daphne mused.

"Well, that's because one of the reasons he's so good at Quidditch is his spatial awareness," Mum said. "He's got a great eye for where people and things are, and he can keep track of it while he's moving. In a fight, that's also a very important skill.

"As an extension of his spatial awareness, he's good at thinking on his feet; because he's seen the layout of either the playing field or the arena, he can come up with plans involving that. And since he mostly does these things instinctively, he doesn't waste time overthinking his actions.

"What makes him a fantastic Quidditch player while he's just a very good duelist, however, is his talent for flying. He's one of those people who could give a star performance on a rickety old Comet Two-Sixty with most of the tail missing."

"So you're saying Ginny and I can't beat him?" Daphne asked.

"Not at Quidditch. At dueling, absolutely, because in a duel it's much easier to do something truly unexpected than in a Quidditch match," Mum said.

"Unexpected, huh…" Daphne mused.

It made sense. If you knew with certainty what your opponent would do, you'd be able to counter it. If only Divination could work on events that near in the future…

But actually, was there any reason that it couldn't? Just because Daphne didn't know how to do it didn't mean it couldn't be done, after all.

She looked through her stack of books until she'd found Pythia. She opened the book and stared at the margins for a moment, closing herself off to the rest of the world.

"Hello," Pythia said.

"Hi. I was wondering…can you use Divination to win a duel?" Daphne asked.

"Theoretically, you could, but it would be very difficult. You would be able to detect the action they're most likely to make and respond accordingly, but to do that in a high-pressure situation would be exceedingly difficult. The technique itself requires a complete emotional detachment and you need to be able to set your focus in emptiness at will. In the case of multiple opponents, you would need to be able to set your focus in emptiness on all your opponents at once, which is more advanced still."

"What happens if your opponent does the same to you?"

"The predictions would most likely simply be wrong. I have no documented cases of something like this in my pages, so you I can't answer the question with any more accuracy than that."

"Hasn't it ever been tested?"

"Not to that degree, no. While Seers aren't that rare, most never really discover or develop their talents. The subset of the ones who do, who also have the rather Muggle sensibility of wanting to methodically test their ability is very small, and the subset of that who would have the skill to use the combat predictions is so small that it's not strange that they've never met each other."

"But you can tell me how to do it?"

"In a sense. The technique you'd use is called the movement shadow. Essentially, it's an exaggeration of a person's regular intuition and experience. You use your divinatory state of mind to enhance your extrapolations about what a person might do.

"For instance, if there is a goblet on the table and someone extends their hand in the direction of that goblet, you would assume they were reaching for the goblet, even though there is no evidence that's what they want to do. It simply makes intuitive sense.

"Movement shadow is when your divinatory state of mind translates a person's arithmantic aura into an action, enabling you to react before the person moves their actual body. However, unlike 'regular' methods of Divination, which are instinctive, reading an arithmantic aura is far more difficult because it takes conscious effort to learn.

"It's an incredibly advanced skill; you're essentially assigning probabilities to probabilities and acting on that in a timeframe of less than a second. If you do master it, you're nigh invincible in a straight fight. If you want to practice, I'd suggest beginning in a non-combat scenario."

Daphne closed the book and looked up. It sounded like a daunting task, but also very worthwhile to explore. For all she knew, the war with Voldemort might take years yet to resolve, and if she could turn herself into an unbeatable duelist by exploiting the fact she was a Seer, her power might finally help her, rather than just showing Harry getting killed.

She hadn't decided yet when to take her one drop of Felix Felicis, and though she didn't like admitting it to herself, the idea of it scared her a bit. What if, even with the Felix, she couldn't find a way to stop Harry from dying? It was stupid; she knew that visions could be changed, so there was no reason to believe that the potion wouldn't help her…but yet, the fear of failure kept making her postpone it, kept making her think, 'I'll do it later'.

"You're looking gloomy," Ginny, who'd evidently finished showering, said.

"Just thinking about that vision," Daphne said, knowing Ginny would understand which one.

"Harry isn't dying," Ginny said firmly, after making sure Mum wasn't nearby.

"I know he isn't," Daphne said. "But I've seen that vision in a crystal ball three times, and countless times in nightmares. I can't put it aside that easily." She sighed and smiled. "But I'll put it aside for now…how are you enjoying the training?"

Ginny grinned. "I love it. It's exactly what I hoped it would be. It's pushing me to my limit, but it never feels like it's overtaxing me. Your mum's clearly trying to build me up, not break me down."

Daphne grinned back. "She'll be glad to hear it. I thought she was being pretty hard on you," she said.

Ginny shrugged. "Well, I need to improve somehow, right? Of course I'm going to be making mistakes; everything I know is self-taught. I'm just happy to have someone so skilled helping me."

When Daphne lay in her bed that night, her thoughts returned to the conversation she'd had with Ginny. She was a bit envious of Ginny's mindset. Being fearless in the face of failure was easy when failure didn't really have any consequences, like failing a test in school. A bad grade could be compensated for, after all.

But when it came to things that really mattered, Daphne was terrified of failure. In her first year, she'd been afraid of failing as a friend, and even though her parents' support had alleviated things a bit, that fear had never left, as evidence by her boggart in her third year. And in her fourth year, during her fateful conversation with Snape, she'd realized that the fear of being a bad friend still wasn't gone.

And, of course, she was afraid to fail in her efforts to find a way to change Harry's destiny, to such a degree that she was actively avoiding using her best chance just because she didn't want to be confronted with failure.

And all the while, both Ginny and Harry faced their futures fearlessly, taking any failures in stride as long as they reached their goals in the end. But maybe that was just because they actually had goals.

When it came right down to it, Daphne really didn't have any goals. Even S.I.N. was more of an ongoing project than something that had a clear finishing point. Ideally, it'd continue to exist once she herself had graduated, and its existence would ensure the goal would accomplish itself over time: people would realize that Slytherin wasn't all bad and the horrible reputation of the House among non-pureblood-supremacists would get better. Even now, it had already begun to do that.

What, then, remained? Graduating? She had no doubts that she'd manage that. Though the O.W.L. results hadn't come in yet, Daphne was certain that she'd have good grades. N.E.W.T.s might be harder, but studying simply wasn't very difficult, so graduating wasn't much of a goal.

And beyond school…sure, she'd said she wanted to be an Auror, but it had really just been something she'd said because she simply didn't know what else to do.

Unlike Harry and Ginny, she didn't play Quidditch, so a professional career in that wasn't something she cared for.

Professional dueling, maybe? She knew it was a thing, but it was far less popular than Quidditch was, and carried a far higher risk of nasty injuries. But then, being an Auror wasn't exactly risk-free, either.

And, of course, she still had her abilities as a Seer. But what could she do with those in a professional setting? Read peoples' fortunes? She'd probably just end up seeing everyone's deaths and getting horribly depressed.

She sighed and turned onto her side. She definitely didn't need her job to depress her. She was doing far too well at that already…

At first, Daphne wasn't sure why she'd woken up. Then, however, she realized she wasn't alone in her room. Someone was standing next to her bed.

"Bloody hell!" she said, scrambling back and sitting up at the same time.

"Sorry," Ginny said softly.

"You nearly gave me a heart attack," Daphne said, shaking her head. "What's up? And what time is it?" she asked.

"Dunno. Somewhere around three in the morning?" Ginny guessed.

She sat down on the edge of Daphne's bed. "I, er…okay, this sounds stupid, given the time, but…er, can we…talk?"

Daphne cocked her head. "Er, sure," she said. "What's wrong?"

Ginny sighed. "Since we came back from the Ministry…I haven't exactly been sleeping well," she said. "I…I keep seeing Voldemort in my dreams. I keep hearing that laugh…and seeing Harry possessed by him…"

She clenched her jaw. "Only in the dream…we don't succeed in saving him…and then Harry kills you…"

She grinned wryly. "I know I act tough, but…it does get to me, you know?"

Daphne smiled ruefully and said, "Yeah, that's the downside of getting involved with our adventures. The dreams are rarely pleasant. I've gotten used to them by now and I still regularly wake up sweating."

"After my first year, I had nightmares too, but they lessened a bit afterward…but you and Harry, and I guess Ron and Hermione too…you end up in situations like that nearly every year. Does it get easier to deal with?" Ginny asked hesitantly.

"Well, I don't know about Hermione and Ron…but for me…it's easier to deal with when I talk about it. Mostly to Harry, though now, of course, I can talk to you as well. And Harry does the same with me, especially after the graveyard."

"Honestly, I feel so…weak when I wake up to dreams like this so often," Ginny said. "I mean…I didn't get severely injured, you didn't, Harry didn't, none of the others did…so why does it affect me so much?"

"Because at the time, you didn't know you were going to survive," Daphne said. "I still dream about my encounter with Voldemort in the Forbidden Forest, even though he never got close to me before Firenze chased him off.

"Hell, the entire reason I call him by his name is because that moment terrified me so much I simply can't call him by something euphemistic anymore. I'm not saying his name out of bravery. It's fear.

"And even though he got way closer to killing me in my second year and at the Ministry, that first encounter probably still scares me the most. I certainly don't think it makes you weak. If someone says it does…well, let them face a life-and-death situation and get through it without nightmares."

For a few moments, neither of them spoke. Daphne looked at Ginny in the sliver of moonlight that came through her curtains. She still looked troubled, and Daphne wished she could do more to help her, however little. Then, she recalled a similar moment, a year before, with Harry…

"Hey, er," she began hesitantly. "If you want to…why don't you just…stay with me tonight?"

She felt her face heating up when she asked it, and she could see that Ginny was equally flustered, even in the low light.

"You, er, you're sure about that?" Ginny asked.

Daphne nodded. "Yeah." She grinned sheepishly. "I wasn't having the best dreams in the world either, so I'll probably sleep better with you here, too…"

Ginny thought about it only for a moment, but then she got up and gestured at Daphne to make some room, which she gladly did.

Ginny climbed into the bed and pulled the covers over both of them. "This is…new," she said. Then she smiled. "But I could get used to this, I think…"

Daphne smiled back. "You and me both…if we ever live together with Harry, though, we'll need a truly massive bed," she said.

"I don't know," Ginny said. "I kind of like being forced to snuggle up like this…"

Daphne felt her face heat up even more. Still…It was pretty comfortable… "Y-yeah…me too…well, er, good night…"

"Good night…"

And for some reason, none of Daphne's earlier worries seemed to bother her anymore for the rest of the night.

Slightly more introspective chapter, this time, but I think it worked out well. I always like writing stuff like this, too.